I shall coax Rob back into software development, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed ShipPoint. We shall take the bus out to that brooding industrial park by the sea and dive down through black abysses of code to the Cyclopean and many-columned database, and in that lair of the Expert Beginners we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

I am the original submitter, although it's been so long that I sent it in that I barely remember it. Anyways, the writing style is done in the style of H.P. Lovecraft so is a little hard to follow. Here's a summarized (but still long, ha!) version:

I joined the company, that claimed to be using cutting-edge technology. The CTO ("Mr. Marsh") and the development manager ("Jimmy") assured me that they were using the latest technologies. Turns out they were using the latest version of .NET, but using it like it was 10 years ago with no design. The senior developer ("Jack") was basically like Larry in the story Slacking Off (http://thedailywtf.com:1000/articles/Slacking-Off) and between him and Jimmy I was stopped from doing refactoring because Mr. Marsh felt it was a waste of time that didn't add value. Jimmy actually used to talk like he was afraid of Mr. Marsh and Jack just didn't care.

When we hired a fresh-faced, brilliant junior developer ("Arthur") he and I became fast friends and wanted to implement some more things that Jack was always against. When we hired a senior developer with 10+ years experience ("Walter") he agreed with us, and the web designer ("Rob") always felt things could be better. The issue was that Jack always would go behind our backs to Mr. Marsh and shoot down the ideas, and since Jack had the most experience in the system Mr. Marsh would always agree with him even after telling the rest of us that it was okay to go ahead.

The end result of this was that Walter and Arthur both quit within a week of each other because Mr. Marsh was constantly shooting down good ideas and having us sacrifice quality (they were trying to sell their formerly in-house app, and it was crashing multiple times a day, including during sales demos). Both of them talked to the owner of the company, explaining why and saying that Mr. Marsh was the problem. I was about to leave myself but Marsh convinced me that I would be made the new manager because I wanted to improve the app and was already doing that role since Jimmy had quit for greener pastures (and, I assume, no Mr. Marsh). I foolishly believed him, and was ultimately fired because I kept trying to get things to improve and actually be quality, while Jack continually worked behind my back to get things stopped while telling me to my face that it was a good idea.

Hope that clears up some of it. Even as a fan of Lovecraft I found the tale a little hard to read from my original version.

List of WTFs:

Refactoring seen as "waste of time" by executives

One developer can overrule 3+ other developers who agree on something

Get developer with 10+ years experience, have him create a report for the CEO and reject it due to things like "I don't like the color of this text" for five months until he quits in frustration, then say he was "slow" and you were probably going to fire him soon if he didn't quit

Get brilliant junior developer, completely ignore his potential and opinion

CTO agrees on changes to development practices, allow developers to test for weeks, then reverse decision 20 minutes before it gets implemented because senior developer threw a hissy fit over something he didn't understand

Lie to developer who wants to fix things around by telling him he can be manager, then firing him while saying his skills aren't good enough

Lose two developers and one network administrator (half of IT department) in a span of three consecutive weeks, all of whom give the same reason why (at least one to the CEO), say that the problem is them and they weren't good enough to work here

Mandate three week sprints because there was no process to deployment, but not give developers anything to enable agile design to the point where we would scrounge around for things to add to the sprint to avoid being asked why only one new thing was going in

Hire new developer with UI design skills, have him redesign the central page of the application completely without telling the sales floor or the sales manager because "They don't know what they want. The executives want it this way so it looks better on tablets" when customers didn't use tablets. Push said change without notifying anyone, then panic and rollback while blaming the developer when the sales floor explodes in confusion the next morning over those changes.

For a bonus I didn't mention in the story:

Hire a creative director under CTO, put him at odds with bitchy marketing manager and never listen to anything he suggests, then when you want him fired say that marketing manager is now his boss and let her do the dirty work while CTO takes off early to avoid confrontation with him after the deed is done

CTO happily shows that he spends most of his day on eBay looking for old video games and that (heard secondhand) he refuses to spend any money on an IT budget because whatever he doesn't spend is given to him as his yearly bonus

Something I found weird in the story was that at the end it seems like you wanted to try to go back to the company you just left. I have been in the position where a position opens in a former employer that I am qualified for, but I have no illusions that I am going to find employment there.

@Nutster: This is written as a homage to the story "The Shadow over Innsmouth" by H.P. Lovecraft. To appreciate it you should really go read that story. The bit at the end is basically a Lovecraft-style way of writing that the events of the past (His time at ShipPoint) haunt him to this day :smile:

@DocMonster: I really enjoyed your article, I think you should write a book in this style. It would be wonderfully verbose :smile:

OK, so I slogged through the rest of it. Calling that Lovecraftian is a bit of an insult to HP. At the end of a Lovecraft novel, you mostly knew what had happened. At the end of that contrived bit of writing I was just left wondering, "WTF was the point of that?" The point of the story is lost behind a mass of pointlessly contrived words. I found not Cthulu, only "WTF?"

I did not write the submission in the Lovecraft style so I cannot take credit for that. In the original submission, I wrote it like a regular story; I'm pretty sure I had different names for the people too but as I said I submitted it like a year and a half ago so I can't 100% remember and lost my original version :frowning: . I did however coin the name, because I had just read the Shadow Over Innsmouth ;)

I did not want to go back, that was added by TDWTF as a homage to the Shadow Over Innsmouth as mentioned before. It does still haunt me though, probably because Mr. Marsh just took a dump on my skills during the firing meeting and made me feel like a crappy developer.

I didn't add it to the story though but I heard from Rob before he left that they hired a guy to replace me, and that guy quit after 2 days because the code was so terrible. That gave me a laugh. Also the fact that they have like a 1 star rating on Glassdoor (I will not give the real name of the company) and at one point purged all the negative ratings.

Yeah...this boredom thing makes me wonder about the quality of coders in this day and age

Are you the person who wrote this? I will assume so?

I appreciate what you were trying to do, but there is no suspense. There will be no horrific sea creature at the end, just a WTF in code or business practices. If you have a huge buildup, you need an equally big payoff. In this case, for me, there was no suspense. Nothing to pull me in. Nothing personal. I just found it contrived and boring.

When I opened the solution containing Jack's jealously-guarded back-end
code, obfuscated though it was behind incomprehensible names like
"Solution1" and "MvcProject4", only then did I begin to grasp the horror
that had taken root beneath the facade of a UI redesign. I saw them in a
limitless stream—flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating—surging
inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant
saraband of fantastic nightmare! That interminable list of
poorly-implemented features, its shapeless mass extending blasphemous
profusions in all directions throughout the code. It seemed to surge and
breathe even as I watched...

Show us, don't tell us.

Walter and Arthur leaving is the point I'd consider the handwriting on the wall.

It was, just like a naive idiot I believed that I was going to be made the lead/manager after we rebuilt the team. I actually turned down an offer on Arthur's last day, or it would have been three developers in three consecutive weeks (Walter gave one week notice, on his last day Arthur gave one week notice, on Arthur's last day I got an offer but declined)

Also that part was fabricated by TDWTF, Jack did not have incomprehensible names for projects or jealously guarded the back-end code at all. He was just lazy and didn't want to do anything to improve the code, in part because his modus operandi was finishing tasks that Mr. Marsh asked for in a short amount of time due to cutting corners everywhere. We often talked that if Jack had taken more of an architect role and offered guidance instead of working against everyone else, it would have been a great team since Jack knew most of the innards of the system, having written most of it with Jimmy.

We could have really improved things. Instead, Jack just didn't want to do anything that Mr. Marsh might not approve of because "he's the boss" and that included changing things to improve our turnaround down the road.

It was, just like a naive idiot I believed that I was going to be made the lead/manager after we rebuilt the team.

Not faulting you for it, I've stayed at a few engagements a lot longer than I should have. Hindsight is 20/20 and all.

DocMonster:

I actually turned down an offer on Arthur's last day, or it would have been three developers in three consecutive weeks

Ouch.

DocMonster:

We could have really improved things. Instead, Jack just didn't want to do anything that Mr. Marsh might not approve of because "he's the boss" and that included changing things to improve our turnaround down the road.

I've heard a lot of lame justifications for technical debt, and my response is usually that at some point, technical debt will prevent changing anything at all, including paid work that's queueing up. The architecture doesn't need to be pretty, but there at least needs to be some semblance of order, or some plan to get there.

What I don't get is why oh why do people stay at a company like that? After knowing they're not interested in refactoring, don't use version control, and you never get to see the CTO you know it's time to leave. You're just wasting your time.

The never seeing the CTO part was added by TDWTFnand didn't actually happen (nor was it in my original submission). We always saw him, his office was right next to the developer area. For the rest I figured they just had never had someone knowledgable about that stuff and I could fix things. Doubly so after I was told I would be promoted to manager.

Personally, I just loved it. It was a brilliant piece in the style of H.P. Lovecraft. It wasn't too long and all the edits by TDWTF seemed to just enhance it. If you don't get the ending then maybe Lovecraft just isn't for you. Where can I find more like it and when's your next piece coming out? I'm definitely a fan.